The Thesis
RSI Snap-Back is a disciplined mean-reversion play on the seven largest US tech names — AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, GOOGL, AMZN, META, and TSLA. The premise is intuitive: even the market's strongest momentum leaders overshoot in the short term, and those extremes tend to snap back. The rules are refreshingly simple — buy names when their RSI drops below 35 (oversold), exit when RSI pushes above 70 (overbought), and rotate to keep a tight book of at most four positions. That hard 4-slot cap is the strategy's discipline mechanism: it forces concentration on the most oversold candidates while capping how much concurrent drawdown the book can absorb.
Backtest Performance
Over a 451-day window the strategy returned 20.95%, growing a $10,000 book to $12,095 — an 11.21% CAGR. The win rate is genuinely encouraging at 66.67% across 37 trades, and trading costs were negligible ($37 in fees, zero FX). Two-in-three trades landing profitably is exactly the hit-rate profile you'd hope to see from a reversion signal that only fires at statistical extremes.
The risk picture is more sobering. A Sharpe of 0.61 is modest, and the maximum drawdown of 23.73% actually exceeds the total return earned over the entire test — you had to stomach a peak-to-trough loss larger than the eventual gain. Turnover of 773% also tells us this is an active rotation strategy, so real-world slippage and execution frictions (which a backtest understates) matter more here than the tiny modeled fee suggests.
The Validation Gap
The most important caveat: the validation field is null. There is no out-of-sample or walk-forward check on record. A 66% win rate over 37 in-sample trades on seven correlated mega-caps is a small sample, and RSI thresholds are exactly the kind of parameters that invite overfitting. Until this strategy clears a proper validation gate, the headline numbers should be read as a hypothesis, not a track record.
Recent Activity: Idle in Cash
Live behavior reinforces the patient-to-a-fault character. The last six scheduled runs — from July 28 through August 4 — all report the same line: 0 executed, 0 rejected, cash $10,000, total $10,000. In other words, the strategy has been fully in cash for a week, finding no name oversold enough to trigger an entry. That's the signal working as designed (it refuses to force trades), but it also means the live book has yet to put real capital to work.
The Verdict
RSI Snap-Back is a clean, disciplined idea with an attractive backtested win rate and trivial trading costs. But a drawdown that swallows its own return, a middling Sharpe, no validation, and a currently dormant live book mean this one stays firmly in the "promising, prove it live" bucket.